Joseph Bonaparte of Point Breeze, Bordentown New Jersey

In case you were thinking that Joe Bonaparte was a guy who hangs out with Tony Soprano or on a certainReality TV show, let me assure you that Joseph Bonaparte, though he may have had some shady business dealings, was no mob guy and certainly would not be at home on the set of Jersey Shore.

Joseph Bonaparte, KIng of Naples and King of Spain, was the older brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, aka Napoleon I, Emperor of France from 1805 to 1815.Defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and forced to abdicate, Napoleon was stripped of his power and after one unsuccessful comeback attempt, spent the last six years of his life in exile, under British control, on the island of St Helena, where he died in 1821.

When the going got tough for Napoleon, his big brother, Joseph, was forced to abdicate as King of Spain and hotfoot it out of the country fast. In 1813 he left Spain for France and then Switzerland, taking the Spanish crown jewels and a sizable fortune in gold with him. When, in 1816, he was exiled from France, he buried the bulk of his horde of gold and jewels and hopped a ship to the New World.

I have not got a clue why he chose to come to America, I was surprised when doing research for this hub to find that Joseph Bonaparte, like the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and various other founding fathers of the United States, was a Mason.Perhaps Masonic brothers helped him decide and get settled. Or, perhaps he had other connections in America.

What is clear is that Joseph Bonaparte traveled under an assumed name, landed in New York and proceeded immediately to Philadelphia where Henry Clay offered him his hotel suite.

Styling himself the " Count de Surviliers " Bonaparte lived in several rented houses in Philadelphia while he ammassed over 1000 acres of land stretching back from the banks of the Delaware River near Thomas Paine's hometown of Bordentown, New Jersey.

While brother, Napoleon languished in exile, Joseph was busy building a vast country estate on his newly acquired New Jersey land holdings. He erected a large, imposing mansion on a bluff overlooking the river, created carriage drives, planted trees, gardens, and even created an artificial lake with several landscaped small islands. His library contained more volumes than the Library of Congress, his art collection was of a quality unknown in Philadelphia and his lifestyle was definitely fit for a king. It is said that Joseph Bonaparte took a certain delight is shocking the sensibilities of the local Quaker ladies by showing them some of the racier paintings and nude statues that he was acquiring as part of his expanding art collection.

By all accounts, Joseph was living large on the gold and jewels he smuggled out of Europe. and his country estate was quite the oasis of sophistication in rustic America. It took three years to complete and contained, in addition to the art gallery filled with works by the likes of Murillo, Rubens, Canaletto, Velasquez, Snyders, Rembrandt, da Vinci, Gerard and Vernet, a state dining room and an impressive grand staircase.

Though his wife remained behind in Europe, two of his daughters, Zénaïde Laetitia Julie Bonaparte (1801–1854) and Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte (1802–1839). lived on the estate for several years. Joseph also had an American mistress, Annette Savage, who bore him two daughters. The older girl died young, but the younger, Catherine Charlotte (b. 1822, d. 1890) married Col. Zebulon Howell Benton of Jefferson County, New York and lived to a ripe old age.

Joseph Bonaparte built a happy and prosperous life for himself in his beautiful house by the Delaware River. For seventeen years he enjoyed his gardens and the quiet life of a country gentleman. But in 1832, after his brother's death, duty called and he left it all to move to London, in order to be closer to France. The death of his brother , Napoleon, and Napoleon's son made Joseph the Bonaparte pretender to the throne, and Joseph wanted to be close by just in case the monarchy should be restored. He was forbidden by French law to enter the country, but London was much closer than America.

In 1839, Joseph Bonaparte joined his wife and family in Florence, where he died in 1844 at the age of 76. He has a very grand tomb and monument in Paris among France's heros at the Hôtel des Invalides' Église du Dôme

The family's American oddessy ended when. Joseph's grandson, also named Joseph, disposed of Point Breeze and its contents in 1847. The furnishings and art collection were sold at auction. A pier table from the house was eventually purchased during the Kennedy Administration for the White House and is there to this day. You can get a glimpse of it in the video above.

The art collection, when it went under the hammer, was one of the finest in America. There are still families in Bordentown who have Bonaparte stories to tell and pieces of furniture or bric a brac handed down as family treasures given to them by Joseph Bonaparte or purchased from the estate auction held years later.

Henry Beckett, the British consul in Philadelphia, purchased Point Breeze in 1850. He demolished the house Bonaparte had built, replacing it with an Italianate villa with such amenities as gas and hot and cold running water. That mansion burned to the ground in 1983 and with it the last vestige of Joseph Bonaparte's vision for the property.

I think many, both in the United States and Europe, would be surprised to know that Joseph Bonaparte, former KIng of Naples and King of Spain, happily lived his own American dream for seventeen years on the banks of the Delaware River, near the town of Bordentown, in the State New Jersey, in the United States of America.